I'm a member in a website and there's a huge (automatically generated) html table on this PHP page that is only available to me and I wanted the table source code because I want to copy it to a html page on my computer to then process it with a program.
Now the problem is, when I right-click to display the page source code it works but I'm tired of looking to the source code and even inside all the linked .js files and I can't seem to find the table or any data of it whatsoever on the scripts/page source codes.
I can select the table data and copy it (just the data) just fine and when I right click on it it doesn't say anything about flash or whatever so I'm assuming it's not flash. The data of the scripts/pages isn't obfuscated with strange characters or anything, it's easily human-readable.
What can I be doing wrong or what can cause this kind of behavior?
UPDATE.
Using Google Chrome's 'inspect element' thing worked, I tried it first because I had it installed so it was faster. I will also use some methods that were talked here in order to see the most convenient to me, also I was thinking on doing a PHP script that would import data from a similar table but I will have to know more about a lot of stuff that was talked here.
Two possible reasons could be that the table may be returned from an AJAX call to another page that returns the HTML for the table, or they could be generating the table's html code and contents on the fly from a list of values coming from javascript or some other source rather than serving the HTML output to you from the server side.
Something you can do to figure it out is see if there are any empty div or other html elements where the table appears to be inserted, and search their javascript files for references to those elements. That may shed some light on how they populate it.
Feel free to update your question with the raw html (where you don't see the table) and maybe some javascript and we can look. Use pastebin if it is a lot of content.
Try a developer extension like http://getfirebug.com/ The underlying source code may not reflect output due to how much the DOM can be modified by javascript with extensive use of ajax. This plugin will permit you to view elements as they're interacting with the browser.
its probably that the table is dynamically generated on the fly so looking at the source code won't actually give you much. try looking at the "GENERATED" source code or inspecting the DOM using Firebug, or the Developer tools of chrome/safari.
Or better yet, try your hand at web scraping:
http://vancouverdata.blogspot.com/2011/02/how-to-web-scraping-xpath-html-google.html
Although I'm not sure if it'll work for pages that need a login. But hey, at least you learned something new :p
Maybe the table is generated with a JS script, if that's the case, doing right click and "View source" would not show you the html. You need to use something like Chrome's devtools. Open google chrome and visit that page, once there, right click the table and select "Inspect element", the devtools will open and then you'll see the table's code, right click it's opening tag and select "Copy as html".
Let me know if that works :)
Would it help to use the Firefox plugin called Firebug?
Using this plugin you can click on an area of a page to see the code displayed in the Firebug section at the bottom of your window.
Here are the details: https://getfirebug.com/whatisfirebug